Opinion

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Opportunists fan the flames of racial unrest

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Violence following the recent fatal shooting of an unarmed robbery suspect in Ferguson, Mo., has tragically followed a predictable script.

On average, more than 6,000 African Americans are killed by gun violence each year. That startling figure is nearly equal to all of the U.S. combat fatalities incurred in both Afghanistan and Iraq over some 13 years. African Americans are the victims in about half of the homicides in America each year despite the fact that blacks represent only about 13 percent of the U.S. population.

One would think that these alarming statistics would provoke the sort of protests that we’ve seen in Ferguson, but that is not the case. Nor does racial unrest automatically follow cases in which white police officers fatally shoot black criminal suspects.

Only a small handful of such instances trigger outrage in the black community. The sort of civil unrest we’re seeing in Ferguson is most likely to be ignited by the infrequent cases in which someone white — police officer or not — fatally shoots an unarmed African American. Controversy arose over George Zimmerman’s fatal shooting of unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin in Florida. Now, small-town Ferguson is in an uproar over a police officer’s fatal shooting of unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown.

There is a second theme in such cases. The media almost invariably distorts the facts, sometimes deliberately seeking to incite tensions. In the Trayvon Martin case, journalists published photos of Martin as a diminutive adolescent, not more recent pictures of Martin as a 17-year-old who was much taller than Zimmerman. Zimmerman was referred to by the New York Times as a “white Hispanic” (a term not usually accorded those of mixed ancestry).

In the Brown case, the media has rushed to portray the victim as a “gentle giant” who was almost certainly gunned down by a racist, trigger-happy cop. Only days later, it was reported that just minutes before his death, the 6-foot-4, 292-pound Brown had allegedly committed a strong-armed robbery, bullying and assaulting a store owner half his size — and had been stopped not far away for walking down the middle of the road.

A third theme is the entrance of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the New Black Panther Party. Almost immediately, they incite tensions by issuing wild, unfounded charges. Jackson called the Brown shooting a “state execution.” Sharpton called the legal acquittal of Zimmerman an “atrocity.” The new Black Panther Party put a bounty on Zimmerman’s head, and in Missouri, it called for violence against the police.

Fourth, demagogic politicians use these tragedies for political advantage — usually making things worse. Libertarian Sen. Rand Paul, who is eyeing a 2016 presidential run, blamed police for their overt military appearance. Yet street violence persisted days after police in military-style riot gear left the scene and the National Guard intervened.

President Obama did not soothe tensions when he claimed that Trayvon Martin looked like the son he never had, an implication that any U.S. president might have greater sympathy with those who shared a similar appearance. Obama initially weighed in on the Brown case before all the details had emerged, faulting both sides equally for the violence.

Finally, these shootings for weeks on end spark racial finger-pointing. Liberals acknowledge high black violent-crime rates but cite poverty, racism and unfair police enforcement as the catalysts. Conservatives counter that high rates of single-parent families, dependence on government entitlements, and glorification of misogyny and violence in popular culture account for inordinate black violent-crime rates.

Eventually, the unrest peaks, then abates, and the country goes back to business as usual — a little more racially divided as we await the next predictable controversy. Meanwhile, we might remember that the American experiment to unite various racial and ethnic groups into one culture is as noble as it is rare. When it has previously been tried in the modern world — Yugoslavia, Cyprus, Iraq, Rwanda, Syria, Congo — it usually had failed spectacularly.

What will save us are not more “conversations” about racial differences, but a new classically liberal effort to consider race irrelevant in our shared American culture. Perhaps if we started treating people as unique individuals and not as hyphenated and anonymous groups, we could deal with these tragic shootings as individual tragedies rather than collective conspiracies.

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